Posts filed under 'Australia'

The latest Farrelly Brothers comedy movie, The Ringer, opened here in Australia last night.

The basic plot outline is that the main character’s only option to erase a really bad debt is to rig the Special Olympics by posing as a contestant. Straight away you can imagine all the major movie-makers running away from that script!

We won’t be able to get out to see the movie for a while yet, but as soon as our babysitters are back from their holiday we definitely will!

The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) charges Australian schools a per-student fee (totalling around AUD$31 million per year Australia-wide) to allow them to reproduce copyrighted works. From what I understand, the fees collected are (partly) distributed to copyright holders to compensate them for the copying. The idea is to allow schools to copy parts of books, magazines, newspapers, audio, video, etc without having to buy a retail copy of the work for every student, which would obviously be uneconomical. Good idea.

Now, CAL wants to add a fee to schools for their use of the internet.

How the hell does that work? Why are the government and the courts even listening to them on this issue?

Works posted on the web are generally covered by copyright, but they’re made freely accessible to the public. If a student visits a publicly-available site and reads some articles, they’re not breaching anybody’s copyright. They’re doing what the copyright holder intended them to do.

How can CAL have any basis to collect a fee in this situation? How could they actually distribute the fees collected to the copyright holders, who may be anywhere in the world?